Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday March 02, 2011 @04:45PM
from the leader-of-the-pack dept.

silverpig writes "Cisco has released a whitepaper on mobile data usage which has some interesting data in it. The top 1% of users consume 20% of the bandwidth, but that share is down from 30% previously. 'Regular' users are catching up as they watch more video. High-bandwidth users of today will be relatively average users by 2015, so network operators should look to those users for insight in designing their future networks."

No, but it means that there should be some verification of the results. For example, take every study ever conducted by the RIAA about file sharing. Those studies have been shown repeatedly to be bullshit.

Of course, everything we've heard seems to support this study about bandwidth, which probably means that it's valid.

No, the fact that there's a significant and obvious conflict of interest means that the paper needs to be dismissed. Do some real research and then make decisions.
Put it another way, would you expect Cisco to provide data saying otherwise? If a paper exists which, regardless of the true situation, is expected to claim (and support with supposed evidence) one thing, the fact that the paper claims exactly that adds no information at all.
What it says is probably right, but that's independent of the paper's e

We work in one of these "high bandwidth" fields, and we see Cisco's determination to be pretty much right.

They might have a conflict of interest to promote new network equipment, but then again it's also their job to know these things. The ultimate question is that is Cisco trustworthy? Yes, they've proven to be, unlike MAFIAA.

Imho, to determine the validity of this research is the same as suspecting Cisco's reputation and honesty. Certainly they have different perspective on things, but that doesn't make t

Anyone who knows enough to speak authoritatively on a subject probably has an interest in it, financially speaking, one way or another. To ignore the conclusions of such people would be to throw away the best possible advice. The trick is not to ignore information coming from sources with conflicts of interest but to aggregate information on the same subject coming from sources with different conflicts of interests so as to obtain a cross-section of probable-neutral information.

On the other hand, look at the infrastructure difference between the US and other countries. Sure, we have rural areas, but in urban areas we aren't getting the level of service that happens in Japan or Korea or even (I think?) some European countries. This is after having "loaned" telecom companies massive amounts of money to build infrastructure, and they (mostly) did not.

When you consider that everyone and their mom is now using Youtube, and wanting to do video phone calls, Skype, streaming Netflix, etc, it's hard to argue with Cisco's conclusions (at least, as the summary stated them;)). In five or ten years, demand for streaming video will likely be even higher, and that's just the most obvious one.

Actually here we get more www traffic from facebook and other web2.0 than anything streaming these days. That is when llnw isn't saturating the net with m$ and game system updates. Streaming users use a fixed stream of bandwidth as they sit transfixed. Bored users hitting reload rack up huge bandwidth budgets. Were web2.0 to make their HTML leaner, we'd save some serious dollars.

Which is more expensive. The Japanese simply used the copper wires that already ran into everyone's home (i.e. the phonelines), so it was cheap and easy for them. It won't be that easy for the americans.

Erm, isn't that exactly what DSL is?

With some of the newer micro head-ends, DSL can be run out of that green box at the end of the street, instead of 4 miles down the road at the nearest sub-office. You only need fiber to the neighborhood patch panel.

This has always been an argument that is badly contended, the data people (Americans) use for these comparisons is definitely flawed just to keep their nationalistic pride. The reason you get those numbers is 1) you are taking Western Europe and Eastern Europe together - the latter has only in the last couple of years been able to afford to pick up the pace. The Russian Federation and China have the same issue - you're adding both poor and rich together while the US is in general considered, very rich throu

I live in Sweden. Medium sized city, pop. 70,000, population density 2,261/km2 (about 80% of the population density of Urban New York City). The apartment complex I live in was built in the '60s.

As a private person, I pay roughly $30 (USD) a month for municipal broadband. And what do I get?* 10 IP addresses.* 100 Mbps connection, and that is up and down. Network jack in the wall that's hooked up to a switch somewhere in the building that's got a fiber connection.* No data transfer cap, no surcharges based on traffic, no closed ports or clauses in the terms of service that say I can't host servers or bullshit like that.

This is not the perk of living in some a luxury apartment, but something that's fairly common.

Not particularly much at all. Some percent of the city's apartment buildings are owned by the municipality. The part of the rent that doesn't go to maintaining said buildings goes towards building infrastructure.

To the extent that the city buildings do not break even with rents and require municipal subsidies, subtract that same PERCENTAGE of the subsidy and add that to your Broadband bill.

Then since your municipality does not pay property taxes to itself, or anyone else, find that same percent of the taxes that a private landlord would pay on a similar building, and add that to your broadband bill.

So what you're saying is?.. He still has that connection and good luck finding such a thing, even if you had the money, in the US, for a residential consumer.

So then, you must be saying that he's got less overall revenue because of hidden fees and such? Funny, then, that quality of life is higher on average.

You're basically coming up with random statistics and numbers and making up that in fact he's paying huge sums, but the fact still stands: he can easily pay for this AND get a comfortable life that is eq

Personally, I live in southern Stockholm.I do not have municipal broadband; my ISP has its own backhaul.

Back in the day when I paid for it, I paid 325 SEK per month ($51 at today's rate). They lowered it to 245 SEK per month ($38) for a few months, and then my home owners' association decided to pick up the bill.

That's a 100/10 connection, 4 IP addresses, private ISP with their own backhaul.

Yeah, the US system is much better. Your tax money went to 'loans,' to give the telcos money to expand their system, which never get paid back, then you still have to pay high prices for substandard internet connections. At least in Sweden they get stuff for their tax dollars.

hey, it's my country too. Any time we try to do something like implement decent public transit, some jerkoff comes along and demands it be profitable, just like roads and airports aren't. Then they bitch about their (low) taxes.

This is a terrible argument that relies on poor treatment of average figures.

If this really were the case, everybody in the urban stretches of New York or Chicago would have awesome internet access since they have the population density and wealth to support such a thing (most small businesses don't even have that kind of net access). The real issue is clearly with the regulations and/or the ISPs...

Sure, I will accept that the average should be lower than a country with a small, de

As for Europe, it's no better than we are. If you compare the US federation with other continent-spanning federations you see this:Mbit/s1: 12.3 Russian Federation2: 10.3 US3: 10.0 EU4: 9.3 Canada5: 8.0 Australia6: 4.8 Brazil7: 3.8 China8: 3.4 Mexico

Hmm? I don't really know of any point in my country (that is remotely civilized, read, has more than 3 houses, a church and a bar standing next to each other) that can't get at the very least 4mbit/sec.

I've seen that quoted in the past, and it implies I wish I could get 10.3 mbps, around here I'm getting half that despite being in an easy to wire area, I'm within 10 miles of a IXP. There's simply no justification for the slow speed, other than Qwest is incompetent and greedy. If a city like Seattle isn't being hooked up at that rate, and we're one of the most connected cities in the country, then how on earth could we possibly be doing that well in terms of the world?

The fact that this is a white paper by a company selling network equipment didn't set off anybody's conflict of interest meter?

I'm not seeing how that ties into anything.

They sell their switches and routers mostly to corporate data centers, carriers, and ISPs. When the publish figures about MOBILE users, they aren't telling us anything we don't already know. They aren't' telling us anything the cell carriers haven't already told us.

Since they do very little DIRECTLY with Mobile devices themselves, all they are tell you is that the big boys are buying stuff to beef up their networks.All the carriers are augmenting their back haul

It does, but on the other hand, Cisco has a pretty strong incentive to make accurate predictions here, for its own benefit. It's better for them to know what the actual market trends are so they can plan for them, than it is to make up wishful numbers. If publishing the white paper helps drum up sales, so be it.

Yup, and playing decent online games, many people who play MMOs of different flavors face GB+ patches once a year, voice comms which is a pretty constant data stream, and the data for the game, which can be quite large.

Unfortunately, people like the AC that posted in a thread below [slashdot.org] kind of suggest otherwise.

I am like h4rr4r. I watch a ton of Netflix, Hulu and download large, legal files (lately, development related ISOs). I'm sure that I am a high bandwidth user, but I am definitely in the minority on Slashdot, and-the-like, because I am not pirating anything.

I am happy that my intense pirating of 7gigabytes of material from the 1950's (which should really be out of copyright now anyway but in any case doesn't risk fierce enforcement in any case) will now disappear as noise amid the enormous amount of legal data I get in openoffice updates and netflix.

And as long as a lot of people support that sort of piracy it will remain that way. Service plans being advertised as providing "up to" a certain amount of bandwidth with no promise of reliability in the fine print and often times a cap which prevents you from using the maximum amount of bandwidth that they're able to provide. It would be nice to have actual truth in advertising regulations in the US. The ones we have are so toothless that you pretty much have to call the FTC up and tell them you're adverti

I thought those heavy users were all supposed to be pirates?....now they say they are early adopters, does this mean we're all going to turn into pirates?

Another interpretation: when video over Internet was brand new, there were few legal options because the market was tiny and undeveloped. Now it has become more mainstream because legal options became available.

For myself, netflix and amazon streaming have reduced the need/desire to look "elsewhere" by quite a bit.

Just because it's an IT infrastructure does not automatically mean that they're wrong. It means that we should eye it somewhat cynically, but if you look at the way it's been up until now, I'd be surprised if they weren't right overall. Just look at all the people streaming Netflix with set top boxes and watching youtube. It doesn't take a lot of sophistication at this point to use a lot of bandwidth, whereas previously you were probably downloading torrents or OS discs.

I think the network operators and ISP's solution to those high bandwidth users is to cap bandwidth, shape traffic, enforce download/upload caps - pretty much anything short of actually spending money on designing a future network.

You're talking about the same companies that knew IPv4 addresses were rapidly depleting for years and are just now taking steps to implement IPv6. Their main concern is minimizing expenses while maximizing profit. The less your average user uses, the more users they can squeeze onto the same pipe. I'm pretty sure most ISPs would love it if everyone bought an $80 data plan and only used it to check their email. There's no room for long term planning when you have shareholders that expect constant short term growth.

It is a logical choice.- The longer you wait, the cheaper upgrading becomes. Upgrade to a 3000 megahertz single core P4 five years ago and spend $1500. Make the same upgrade today and spend $150. The same decreasing cost applies to upgrades in Servers and DSL or cable or fiber lines.

No, it's not logical, this isn't equivalent. The cost of implementation goes up a lot just before a critical switch over date appears. Consultants don't become more numerous just because there's a date coming up that requires their services. Ultimately, it costs a lot of money to try and make these sorts of switches overnight, and you do pay a premium for doing so.

I don't really think it's about them being too cheap to increase their infrastructure. I imagine they will do that too.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I honestly believe that it has more to do with them wanting to effectively put meters on content delivery in order to milk more money out of it. They want to get this in place during the early adopter phase so that it will be perceived as standard practice when it truly becomes mainstream. Sure, the internet is mainstream enough that even your grandmother is watchin

And Ta-DA, another idiot seems to think no network improvement is needed, and points out the obvious.

Enjoy your data caps and crazy cell phone bills competing for bandwidth on that 1990's era cellular network.At all costs, lets make sure Cisco can't make any money. We will all just limp along with what we have.

Good point.This has been noticed before. Using a bi-directional general purpose network to stream video content to a device barely able to run long enough on its battery to finish a movie makes very little sense.

Several proposals [arstechnica.com] have been put forth [tvnewscheck.com] for OTA TV tuners in phones. Instead of running a transmitter, receiver, and processor intensive decoding, just toss in a receiver and tuner. Way cheaper. Way less power demanding.

Yes, you lose the on-demand capability, but probably 50% of what gets streamed

Yes, you lose the on-demand capability, but probably 50% of what gets streamed these days would disappear by allowing OTA broadcasts to be seen where ever you happen to be.

Nonsense. On demand capability is a killer feature and people want it very, very badly. Those that don't want it will want it, and those that don't know they want it now will miss it if it went away. People are used to the television and radio model of tuning in at a certain time, but it's not something anyone really wants and doesn't make any sense for things that aren't live. We have gone too far down the on demand slide to ever go back.

It would not work in the United States because (1) to be a broadband ISP you simply must own the cables and infrastructure is very expensive, and (2) local governments routinely give away monopolies that prevent competitors from operating.

In the USA broadband internet access is classified differently from telephone service and doesn't require any sharing of physical lines. Before broadband when everything was dial-up you could start your own ISP with almost trivial effort: a little hardware and a good uplin

I'm wondering if this means the same is true for all broadband. Obviously there will always be heavier users, and I think everyone here knows they need to worry more about upgrading infrastructure and less about how to limit users to make it work as it is, but could they realistically NEED to increase their capacity within the next few years to avoid having their pipes always clogged by what's become regular usage?

That's true, but do their conclusions sound wrong to you? Of course more people are learning to use the net to watch movies and download music (legally and illegally), that's normal, isn't it? Eventually, the majority of people will be doing that, I think, unless limits are imposed on the market (e.g. some anti-competitive, fucked up notion of 'net neutrality', metered billing or what have you, that ISPs lobbied for to limit the need for infrastructure investment).

Oh their conclusions sound right, it's just disappointing that the only voice of connom sense in the industry is speaking out of commercial interest. They'd be saying the same thing if the internet were a veritable ghost town. If a telco would man up and say "we need more infrastructure", that would be worthy of applause. All I'm hearing from them right now, though, is "we need less customers", and I'd be happy to oblige if we had real alternatives in Australia. There's Telstra, who's coverage is nowher

In Canada, we are facing a fight over Usage-Based-Billing, and whether the federal government can effectively force it on ISPs. The idea isn't actually terrible per se, but the way they're trying to implement it certainly is.One thing that has come up time and time again is that it's to protect the consumer from the excess of the 1% of extreme consumers. They're often implicitly labelled as pirates by the ISPs, but in fact are the vanguard.An excellent article in the Globe and Mail [theglobeandmail.com] had this to say on the matter:

The knowledge that penalties await heavy Internet usage does something quite terrible: discourage desirable behaviour. Most of Bell’s arguments for treating consumers as wrongdoers rely on the villainization of “bandwidth hogs” who use up everyone else’s bandwidth and generally bring misery to the land. But there are better words for big users of the Internet: “pioneers” and “innovators.” A nation that spends its time worrying about bandwidth caps is not a nation that leads.

The cell phone companies are way ahead of the curve on this one. They've been working on ways to screw us over for years now... and the more you know about making the sausage (from sites like HoFo [howardforums.com]), the more you know how bad you're getting it. Especially in the US.

Just a few days ago, I got a text message from T-Mobile saying, "Texas Recovery Fee now included on monthly bill." Oh for crying out loud. Does the grocery store charge me a "Municipal Services Recovery Fee" to get back the cost of their food service license? Even the tire store doesn't charge the "tire disposal fee" if I tell them to load 'em up in the back seat. I'd drop 'em in a minute if it weren't for two things: 1) Everyone else is just as bad or worse, and 2) T-Mo makes it easy and *cheaper* to stay *out* of a contract, which actually makes me *more* likely to stay.

What's the obvious logic? You may as well take the tires, and do something with them that will probably leave them in some form of litter. After all, you've paid for their disposal. You may as well take them and get some entertainment or other temporary use out of them, too. Instead of just leaving them with the store to be disposed of.

Thats sorta what not requiring the fee to be paid does.. Yes, if the fee isn't required, you could walk out with the tires and the money and still do the same thing. But that

Great idea and you also have a great social mind with no selfish interest in your heart at all. The problem is that your planned behavior might cause the tire disposal charges to raise even higher thus making citizen who do not have such a rebel way of thinking to subsidize your own behavior.

The problem with the structure of both DSL and cable based residential internet connections in the US is that it is a "star" configuration with a "neighborhood node" or DSLAM at the core. You can connect up many homes to the node before things start to degrade, but the limiting factor is the upper limit on the bandwidth between the Internet at large and the neighborhood node. Once you reach that limit all you can do really is split up the homes onto two nodes with separate feeds to the head end and the In

Well, shouldn't early adopter pay more then ? Early adopter of cutting edge CPU and motherboards and of any technology for that matter usually pay more than after the technology has become mainstream.

I have unlimited bandwidth and I would like it to stay that way but seriously, when you think about it, are upgraded networks going to be given by Cisco to anybody who asks ? Usually, the consumer ends up paying one way or another. You have the choice to let casual users finance heavy users or to charge per use

I get free minutes all the time. Just a flat monthly rate. As for early adopters being subsidised by casual users, I think you have it backwards. It is the early adopters that are doing the subsidizing. Most of the subsidizing was done early on when the casual users didn't even have a connection. The early adopters paid to get the whole system up and running. Now, early adopters are the ones that are paying for the higher bandwidth connections. Every ISP I know of has multiple tiers of service. I pa

As for early adopters being subsidised by casual users, I think you have it backwards. It is the early adopters that are doing the subsidizing. Most of the subsidizing was done early on when the casual users didn't even have a connection. The early adopters paid to get the whole system up and running.

This is not inconsistent with what I said, as for early adopters of any technologies like CPUs, the early adopters usually pay all the R&D budget etc. Once the company has paid its R&D and infrastructure budgets, it can then afford to make the technology mainstream and lower the prices because the cash coming in is now pure profit.

So, at any point in time "early adopters" or people using more resources than average are usually paying more. For the CPU example, casual users subsidizing early adopters

I don't necessarily have an objection to a per-bit charge, under two conditions:

1. The charge is reasonable compared to the actual cost of sending that bit (none of this $2/GB crap).

2. I get the maximum available speed on the network at that time - you don't get to constrain me based on speed *and* volume. That's like saying you're going to charge me for my water based on usage and water pressure.

The Canadian numbers were a joke, though - the caps were so slow that if you actually got the advertised spe